


And stars don't care what you wish

by adreadfulidea



Category: Discworld - Terry Pratchett, Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Crossover
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-15
Updated: 2015-03-15
Packaged: 2018-03-18 00:56:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,081
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3550094
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/adreadfulidea/pseuds/adreadfulidea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Esme was twelve years old when she decided she was going to be a witch.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And stars don't care what you wish

 

Esme was twelve years old when she decided she was going to be a witch.

The year before her mother had watched her with anxious eyes - soft and brown, not the Weatherwax eyes, Esme and Lily didn’t resemble their Mum - waiting for some sign of magic. A table moved without touching it or a garden sprung up overnight, like Lily’d had. But anything Esme grew had to be done the old fashioned way by seeds in the dirt, and anything she moved was with her own two hands. The hoped-for letter never came.

“Well,” Mum had said, dully, looking her youngest daughter over. “I suppose that’s it, then. Can’t be helped, and there’s plenty to be done around here, anyhow. You won’t sit idle. It don’t matter.”

But it did matter, and Esme knew it.

Still, for a year she tried. For a year she woke up early to feed the chickens and brought the goats in from pasture and scrubbed the floors, down on her hands and knees with no wand-waving to make it easier. And then, at the end of that year, Lily came home.

Lily was sixteen and accomplished. They were talking about making her head girl, she said and Esme didn’t really believe. A Weatherwax had been the Headmaster of Hogwarts, back in the day, and maybe Lily would be some day too. She had ambition for a Gryffindor, that was for sure.

(Esme alway thought she’d be in Slytherin, if she had been allowed to go. But of course she would never find out. The first Weatherwax squib in generations.)

One summer day she walked into Lily’s room and found her holding a rat up by the tail. The poor creature was squirming in pain, writhing and squeaking. “I made it,” Lily said, with a roll of her eyes. “It’s not real, it doesn’t have _feelings_. Don’t look at me like that, Esme. You don’t know how it works.”

Lily was mad for transfiguration. Very talented at it, her teachers said. The rat had probably been a teacup or a comb before, but that wasn’t the point. Here and now it was as alive as Esme herself; here and now Lily was hurting it.

And Esme had looked at the rat, twisting and making pathetic noises in her sister’s hands, and thought, I can’t be having with this.

 

 

Nanny Gripes had been quite the witch, in her youth. Head of her class, went on to train with the Aurors. Had one too many close calls and bad memories and developed a love for the bottle rather than the law. She returned home before she was even forty and took up teaching schoolchildren. She taught them maths, literature, all their pre-magic subjects. By the time she was in her sixties dozens of children had been put through her schoolroom. Esme Weatherwax was one of them.

She was a very bright girl, Esme, if not much given to books. Not a spark of magical talent, unfortunately.

Nanny had retired by the time her former student set up camp on her lawn. If she drank a little too much that was her business, and if she didn’t have much to do with her days - well, so was _that_. She kept to herself and people let her. She wasn’t an Ogg, for Merlin’s sake.

And then Esme showed up, sitting in a chair between rows of Nanny’s flowers. She had brought it from home, along with some food for tea and supper in a satchel. That was it.

Nanny opened her door and called out. “Esme! What’re you doin’? Don’t you have chores at home?”

Esme twisted in her chair to look back at Nanny. “Sure, I do. But Mum’ll have to do them for now. I have business here.”

“What?” a baffled Nanny Gripes asked. It wasn’t as if she owed the Weatherwaxes money.

“I want to be a witch,” said Esme, and Nanny shut the door on her.

In retrospect, that might have been the hangover.

The next day she tried to be kinder. She went out and spoke to Esme face-to-face, wearing the expression she always had when she’d needed to tell some parent that little Billy had failed all his examinations. “You’re a squib, my gel,” she said. “You can have a good life for yourself. But you can’t have this.”

Esme’s face turned slowly towards Nanny, those blue eyes - those Weatherwax eyes - sweeping over her. Nanny felt a chill go over her from head to foot.

“I want to be a witch,” Esme said, and that was all.

She didn’t read, or knit, or occupy herself in any way during those days out front of Nanny’s house. Just sat in her chair and stared at everyone passing by until they found their feet moving faster than usual. A few times that young Ogg girl, Gytha, stopped by. She sat on the grass and chatted blithely away as though her friend weren’t doing something deeply strange. Once she brought her a piece of cake, probably baked by her mother. The Oggs were always eating something.

Three weeks in Nanny snuck out the back door and went to see Esme’s parents. “You’ve got to get that girl to stay home,” she said. “I can’t budge her.”

Mr. Weatherwax looked up at her over his cup of tea. “Why,” he said, “in the name of the gods d’you think that we could?”

So Nanny went back. Nanny went back to her dusty old cottage with the walls that needed painting and the floor that needed washing. She looked out her window at the blonde head sitting amongst her roses, at the girl’s soldier-straight posture and squared shoulders.

There was a bottle of bourbon on the kitchen table, and a glass. Nanny put them both away, and took out some schoolbooks she hadn’t opened in years.

She threw open the door. “Esme!” she called. “Come here if you’re going to. I don’t have forever, I’m old already.”

Esme walked to the door with that quick stride of hers, unflinching. She had her father’s strong jaw and arched nose, and she didn’t smile. “You’ll teach me?”

“You can’t do wand magic,” Nanny said. “You don’t have the ability.”

“Don’t need it,” said Esme, and Nanny let her in.

(Many years later they would call a child named Harry _the boy who lived_ , and raise their glasses to him in a toast. But Esmerelda Weatherwax? She was the girl who _chose_.)

 

 


End file.
